Israel’s “Iron Dome” system went into action during this month’s fighting with insurgents in Gaza. The remarkable photo above shows the cutting-edge Israel interceptor missiles at left, and the crude, vastly cheaper Palestinian rockets at right. It depicts the essence of “asymmetrical warfare.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-20385306
Israel has developed a putrid-smelling liquid called “skunk water,” which it sprays out of trucks to disperse Palestinian rioters.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34227609
The U.S. experimented with a helicopter-carrying submarine. It didn’t work out.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40580/uss-sealion-was-the-navys-unique-helicopter-accomadating-submarine
Here are the world’s worst aircraft carriers.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/aircraft-carriers-didnt-make-it%E2%80%94and-how-they-influenced-ones-did-184495
The U.S. Army is adopting incredible new night vision goggles, named (in characteristically dry fashion) the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular (ENVG-B). It uses ambient light amplification and thermal imaging to generate colorful, composite images that are much more detailed than the monochrome green images we’re used to.
https://gizmodo.com/the-armys-new-night-vision-goggles-look-like-technology-1846799718
One thing blocking laser weapons is their incredible inefficiency: using a laser to burn a cylinder-shaped hole through a human body requires literally 1,000 times more energy than shooting a bullet of the same diameter through them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXqOHk1LgD8
3D, moving holograms like those shown in many sci-fi films, are a long way off. The best we can manage are tiny holograms that are hazardous to use (note the scientists in the video wearing goggles to protect their eyes from the hologram’s laser projector).
https://youtu.be/N12i_FaHvOU
A machine just won the world’s premier crossword puzzle championship, meaning it is probably better than the best human.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56934716
“Clearly AI is going to win [against human intelligence]. It’s not even close.”
–Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prizewinner for psychology and behavioral economics
‘Before they outlive us by eons, our avatar might be a friend and a companion that really “gets us.” While they’re at our side, they’ll continually learn about us from us. They’ll be a sounding board on personal and professional matters and will always be prepared to fill in for us in a variety of situations as needed.
And that’s where things can get a little disturbing. Will our avatar be the idealized us or just more of the same? Will the avatar of a criminal also be a criminal? Will there be armies of avatars? Will we compete with our avatar for the love and attention of others? Will they become too much like us – with weak moments and ulterior motives? Can we program our avatar for good?’
https://futuristspeaker.com/artificial-intelligence/digital-ai-avatars-of-ourselves/
Is California ready for the “ArkStorm”?
‘A severe California winter storm could realistically flood thousands of square miles of urban and agricultural land, result in thousands of landslides, disrupt lifelines throughout the state for days or weeks, and cost on the order of $725 billion.’
https://www.usgs.gov/natural-hazards/science-application-risk-reduction/science/arkstorm-scenario?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects
Though it is in chilly northern England, fig trees suited for the Mediterranean grow on the Don river’s banks. Why? Because nearby factories divert the river water to cool their machines, then dump it back in, raising the Don’s overall temperature. This is a tiny example of the waste heat problem that could someday pose a serious threat to Earth.
https://ianswalkonthewildside.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/river-don-fig-forest/
We could use genetically engineered plants and fungi in the future to clean up wastes in the soil and to extract trace amounts of valuable minerals and elements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomining
There are about 50 billion wild birds.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57150571
‘The intertwined story of these three characters—the sea slug E. rufescens, marine algae of the genus Bryopsis, and the newly identified bacteria—form a three-way symbiotic relationship. A symbiotic relationship is one in which several organisms closely interact. In this example, the slug gets food and defensive chemicals, the algae get chemicals, and the bacteria get a home and free meals for life in the form of nutrients from their algae host.’
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-sea-slugs-algae-bacterial-weapons.html
“Somewhere around 5 to 20% of our genomic DNA appears to be detritus from ancient retroviruses.”
Have our bodies repurposed this genetic material to serve useful functions, or it is all “dead weight” that saps energy from our cells? Would people who deleted all their useless DNA have genomes that were so much shorter they wouldn’t count as Homo sapiens anymore, even though they were identical to regular humans at the macro-level?
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/05/10/integration-into-the-human-genome
‘From a technical perspective, cloning humans and other primates is more difficult than in other mammals. One reason is that two proteins essential to cell division, known as spindle proteins, are located very close to the chromosomes in primate eggs. Consequently, removal of the egg’s nucleus to make room for the donor nucleus also removes the spindle proteins, interfering with cell division. In other mammals, such as cats, rabbits and mice, the two spindle proteins are spread throughout the egg. So, removal of the egg’s nucleus does not result in loss of spindle proteins.’
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Cloning-Fact-Sheet
After 26 years of FDA safety approval delays, genetically engineered salmon can now be sold to people in the U.S.
https://reason.com/2021/05/14/after-26-years-of-fda-delays-u-s-consumers-can-finally-buy-genetically-enhanced-aquabounty-salmon/
The is a VR headset that lets you see the world through the eyes of someone high on magic mushrooms.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-16316-2
Here’s a flashback to the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show featuring a groundbreaking 55 inch OLED TV. They’re now becoming common.
https://youtu.be/sa87ZQtj3ag
Another of my future predictions (first made in 2019) is getting close to coming true. My prediction:
‘[During the 2030s], movie subtitles and the very notion of there being “foreign language films” will become obsolete. Computers will be able to perfectly translate any human language into another, to create perfect digital imitations of any human voice, and to automatically apply CGI so that the mouth movements of people in video footage matches the translated words they’re speaking.’
The article says a British company called “Flawless” is using deepfake technology to do what I predicted. The sample footage is “fair” quality, and the CGI mouth movements don’t look totally real, but of course it will improve with time.
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-makes-de-niro-perform-lines-flawless-german/
Wikipedia’s “List of emerging technologies” is an interesting read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies
Electric engines are much lighter than equivalent gas-powered engines, but electric cars are much heavier because they need huge batteries. If the energy-density of batteries improved by about 40%, which could happen, then the vehicles would weigh the same.
https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-an-average-electric-car-weigh-as-opposed-to-a-comparable-gasoline-powered-car
‘Instead of trying to max out every cubic meter of the hall, [the Takaoka II car factory] more or less ignores the 3rd dimension. Everything happens on one flat plane. There are no overhead gantries, and because nothing happens above, there are no height restrictions for the cars made on the shop floor. There is a lot of those two dimensions in the back of the giant, but simple hall Takaoka II occupies: Half of its space sits empty, breathing space for the flexible lines. The super-flexible “Takaoka II could theoretically build any number of models on the same line,” tells me Akahane, “but it probably would stop making sense at six.”’
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26955/inside-toyotas-takaoka-2-line-the-most-flexible-line-in-the-world
‘The Heavy Press Program was a Cold War-era program of the United States Air Force to build the largest forging presses and extrusion presses in the world. These machines greatly enhanced the US defense industry’s capacity to forge large complex components out of light alloys, such as magnesium and aluminium.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
‘But TSMC’s vice president of corporate research, Dr. Philip Wong, was keen to point out that after introducing his company’s latest node, despite a history of the node naming scheme actually having some relevance to the silicon features etched into the wafer, the node names are now effectively meaningless. So, while we might like to think that the N7, N5, and N3 names it’s using for its 7nm, 5nm, and 3nm nodes relate to the gate length of transistors, they’re effectively just brand names.’
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/tsmc-7nm-5nm-and-3nm-are-just-numbers
The DC police department and a major U.S. oil pipeline were hacked and the stolen data ransomed.
https://apnews.com/article/police-technology-government-and-politics-53e54780aa080decbb78d5b88d4ff44b
https://apnews.com/article/europe-government-and-politics-technology-business-938b33938fe3a750367fb1dc2f7ce6e0
This video explains why the oil pipeline hack was so disruptive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBPud5PyySk
Interesting, though this is obviously a more expensive way to make objects. You might be able to make five standard, mass-produced, sub-optimal chairs for the same cost (in terms of money and time) as one customized, optimized chair. Spare parts availability is another problem.
https://futurism.com/generative-design-could-radically-transform-the-look-of-our-world
A second fighter pilot who saw the UFO during the 2004 USS Nimitz incident has come forward, and confirmed the first pilot’s public account.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY
Reports have emerged of another encounter between the U.S. military and UFOs. This one happened in July 2019, and involved strange aircraft flying near U.S. warships during training missions. The aircraft were detected on radar, and by thermal sensors and night vision cameras.
https://twitter.com/TODAYshow/status/1398262582599815172
https://www.mysterywire.com/ufo/uss-omaha-ufo-video/
Some of the recent UFO sightings by U.S. military people might have been of Russian and Chinese unmanned spy drones that were purposefully made to look weird. The two countries are aware of the U.S. government’s strong aversion to ever talking about or even investigating possible alien spacecraft sightings, so they built expendable spy balloons and spy drones that look strange and have weird radar and thermal signatures, and have been launching them off the East and West coasts to surveil our military forces during routine exercises.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones-are-spying-on-the-u-s-and-the-pentagon-acts-like-theyre-ufos
Here are some very exotic notions of what aliens might be like. Machine aliens and aliens that use DNA that is chemically different from ours are the tamer hypotheses.
https://listverse.com/2015/07/17/10-hypothetical-forms-of-life/
It might be possible to “blow up” Jupiter by detonating a nuclear weapon in the layer of its atmosphere that is rich in deuterium. The resulting explosion would release thousands of times more energy than the Sun, obliterating whichever side of the Earth was facing the planet at that moment.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/34573/what-would-be-the-characteristics-of-jupiter-if-it-shrank
The first human went into space 60 years ago.
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-lifestyle-travel-apollo-11-moon-landing-business-cbe5e6b34422af6a80ae92fe084981be
SpaceX’s new, reusable “Starship” rocket made its first successful test flight. It could be used to send astronauts back to the Moon and possibly to Mars.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57004604
Virgin Galactic’s “Unity” space plane made a successful test flight, reaching an altitude of 55 miles. For comparison, passenger planes typically fly at 5 or 6 miles, and the International Space Station orbits at an altitude of 254 miles. Unity could start ferrying tourists to the edge of space as early as next year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57214988
China landed its first rover on Mars, becoming only the second country to do so.
https://apnews.com/article/china-technology-business-science-e1c1d0679aa78a8cc79c04a4d1375322
The threat of Earth being encircled by “space junk” that prevents us from going into space anymore is exaggerated and ultimately a solvable problem. Most of the debris in orbit falls back to Earth in a matter of decades.
https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html
“Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years … all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet,” Bezos added.
https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11826514/jeff-bezos-space-save-earth
Using a giant solar panel floating in space, we could capture enough energy from the Sun in a year to manufacture a tiny black hole. Its Hawking Radiation emissions could then be harnessed to power a space ship. The artificial black hole would have a diameter measured in quintillionths of a meters. The smallest known naturally occurring black hole, by contrast, is ten miles wide. The hypothetical, manmade black hole would still have a mass of 1 – 6 million tons. A fully loaded U.S. aircraft carrier weighs about 100,000 tons.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803.pdf
We’d save a lot of money if we spread out of electricity consumption more evenly over each day. The big spikes in demand each morning and evening when people wake up and get home from work, respectively, as well as surges caused by unexpected events at other times, strain the electric grid and force it to use expensive energy sources in those circumstances. “Virtual batteries” could be part of the solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oke45rH4QgU
Worldwide, 463 million people age 25-64 have diabetes. If people 65+ are included, then the number could easily exceed half a billion. The vast majority of the afflicted have Type 2 diabetes, which is a preventable disorder that only arises after many years of poor lifestyle choices (overeating, bad diet, lack of exercise).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(21)00089-1/fulltext
Yes, it’s possible to work so hard that you give yourself a heart attack. Or a stroke.
This probably explains part of why men die sooner, as they are much likelier to work extreme amounts (55+ hours a week).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412021002208
The FDA just approved the first brain-computer interface medical device, meant to help stoke victims recover use of their paralyzed hands.
https://newatlas.com/medical/first-fda-approved-brain-computer-interface-ipsihand-stroke/
Joe Biden wants to waive patent protections on the new COVID-19 vaccines so factories in other countries can make them without paying royalties. It’s a bad idea.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/05/06/waiving-ip
The September prediction from the WHO was right: “We are really not expecting to see widespread vaccination until the middle of next year.”
Only in the last week did the U.S. vaccinate the first half of its population against COVID-19. Some poorer countries have only vaccinated 1% of their people so far.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-09-widespread-coronavirus-vaccination-mid-.html
Bill Gates predicts the COVID-19 pandemic will be over by the end of 2022.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-billgates-idUSKBN2BH0SX
From January: “And, very sadly, if you do the math, we could be looking at 800,000 to 1 million dead Americans by the beginning of May.”
Actual U.S. COVID-19 death toll as of May 4: 574,000
https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2021/1/18/how-bad-will-covid-19-get
And this prediction from the fine minds at J.P Morgan was also wrong.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-pandemic-could-be-effectively-over-by-april-j-p-morgan-says-heres-why-51613163599
COVID-19 is pounding India. They can’t dispose of the dead bodies fast enough.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56897970
COVID-19 has killed between 7 and 13 million people worldwide.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/05/15/there-have-been-7m-13m-excess-deaths-worldwide-during-the-pandemic
Calls are growing to investigate whether COVID-19 was manmade.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fauci-not-convinced-covid-19-developed-naturally
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/27/china-lab-wuhan-coronavirus-covid-biden/